Developer Runner Duck found success in 2017 with their strategy-management-roguelike hybrid Bomber Crew, a game about moving characters around a mid-flight warship to keep it in tip-top shape. The team’s follow-up Space Crew took the action to outer space, in an FTL-style twist. And now that on-the-fly vehicular mayhem is coming down to the ground in the newly announced Badlands Crew.
Badlands Crew takes place in a lawless post-apocalyptic desert where survivors drive patchwork wagons with spikes, speakers, and gatling guns bulging out of every appendage, à la Mad Max. That setting drags new hazards along with it including giant sandworms, acid rain storms, and four gangs of enemies with their own battle strategies. The press release even hints at some Shadow Of Mordor-esque machinations in the sandy campaign map, as your chosen path can shift warlord influence around.
So, the land-based action is all new, but Badlands Crew is still a Crew game through and through. You’ll still be glueing together your own battle trucks. You’ll still be customising your crew and picking the right people for the right wagon. And you’ll still be micro-managing their every move to drive through the dunes, repair the cars on the go, and blow up some baddies in the meantime.
“We’ve taken everything we’ve learnt from Bomber Crew and Space Crew,” says the studio’s co-founder Jon Wingrove, “and are working on all new and improved features which hugely increase the ways players can approach the game.”
Our review of Space Crew said the “bouts of tactical damage control are a masterclass in controlled chaos.” Some of the management sections in between placed a halt to that chaotic goodness, “but not enough to put too big a dent in the fun.”
Badlands Crew is due to release in 2024 on PC, with a console release sometime after. You can wishlist it on Steam now.
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